Ancient Tapestries

Summary: For the most part large size looms have been used to weave tapestries on. A good amount of types of threads have been used to create laces like gold, silk and silver threads weaving different pictures of subjects plus those of the peasant scenes after Teniers, Biblical history, mythology, etc. Tapestries have been used as wall hangings yet unlike needlework, it was woven on a loom. It was also made in levels much larger than would generally be used in hand-stitched embroidery...

For the most part large size looms have been used to weave tapestries on. A good amount of types of threads have been used to create laces like gold, silk and silver threads weaving different pictures of subjects plus those of the peasant scenes after Teniers, Biblical history, mythology, etc. Tapestries have been used as wall hangings yet unlike needlework, it was woven on a loom. It was also made in levels much larger than would generally be used in hand-stitched embroidery; tapestry panels ranging from ten or twelve feet in height and twenty feet long are rather typical. The main medium was wool, but in special models silk was moreover used. In some of the finest works the use of gold and silver can be seen. The main center of tapestry weaving from the year 1500 has been Brussels. But the outputs during the years have enormously varied in quality. Biblical and Roman history, peasant, mythology and scenes ensuing Teniers were some of the subjects. Several seventeenth-and eighteenth-century works are let down by the reality that over the years a murky brownish image has faded their red dyes. Brussels tapestries usually own a mark with a shield with the letter 'B' on either side. At times weavers add their names or initials, in the work. There were two critical factories in France. Both the Gobelins and Beauvais were established in the second half of the seventeenth century. Though the former was a private worry with State support, the latter was a Royal factory and it was only in the late eighteenth century when one could buy any of its productions. Though both did work of the highest quality, Beauvais was generally well-known for a chain of panels established on the Fables of La Fontaine, and for a large amount of sets of settee covers and chairs. The former was also produced at Gobelins, where approximately 1775 they made beautiful and model sets of furniture covers and matching wall hangings. Example of these types of decorative harmony is to be seen in a room constructued by Robert Adam, remains at Osterley Park, near London. A set of furniture (shorn of its wall-hangings but even now intact Gobelins covers) made for Moor Park in Hertfordshire, is housed in the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. A good deal of of these rich ensembles are intact even now, but a collection of tapestries that had been made for a store at Croome Park in Warwickshire has been sold off for a sum of